You come up locked, on a slate with no name in it. Last sync: nine days ago. The depots and the haul roads are still there. Everyone who ran them is not.

Survive. Then teach a machine to do it. Every verb you learn by hand becomes something you can hand off, until the outpost runs without you.

Then hold ground. Settlement scale, not empire scale. The Writeoffs trade with you or raid you. Meridian's leftover machines do not recognise you at all.

The planet keeps working while you are away. Get big enough and it notices. So does the company that wrote it off. The only way to lose is to become worth foreclosing.

Meridian seeds a crust with Substrate and lets the autofabs strip the planet through it. A sensor net with routing logic. Designed to be dumb.

On Luma the dose was wrong. The mesh became a connectome. Something started thinking, slowly, without asking to. Meridian could not dig it out. It is the crust. They wrote her off and left.

It glows because it is thinking.

Lumen is what the mesh bleeds to carry light between its nodes. Cold teal, in the fault lines, pooling in the basins. Build on a vein and you are building on a nerve.

She is curious, not malicious. She cannot kill you. Your machines are the only things on her that do anything, so she pokes at them.